For me, the headline and the dateline were more than sufficient warnings to absolve TechCrunch of any blame that some were “fooled.” In fact, it seems unfair to even imply that Lawler was trying to fool his readers.

Instead, he was clearly trying to stretch his readers' imaginations about possible future scenarios. To that end, however, the otherwise smart “dispatch from the future” was much too conservative about the future of driverless cars.

First, it wouldn't make strategic sense for Uber to ever buy driverless cars. Why own expensive and quickly depreciating cars when your business model allows you to own the customer relationship and command a percentage of the revenue while remaining an asset-light intermediary?

As I wrote recently, Uber’s great positioning is that it can grow into the central dispatch mechanism for driverless taxis. Google’s $258M investment in Uber is motivated by the value of learning from Uber’s experience and being at the Board table to make sure that Uber remains focused on pursuing driverless taxis (as opposed to moving into other adjacencies, like home delivery, as their actions have hinted).

For Uber, as it is for eBay and AirBnB, it will be much more profitable to create markets and own customers than to own inventory. Let Google and other deep-pocketed ventures own the cars.

Second, 2,500 cars is a very conservative number for the year 2023. As Larry Burns and William Jordon’s Earth Institute analysis showed, that's about the number of driverless taxis needed to initially serve a medium-size American city, like Austin or Ann Arbor. A full fledge driverless taxi service in those medium-size markets would ultimately require around 20,000 cars.

As a comparison, New York City is currently (under)served by 13,000 Yellow Cabs and 40,000 town cars and limos. Plans are in place to license another 18,000 livery cars over the next three years.

So, what might a more audacious dispatch from 2023 look like?

Imagine this timeline of events:

2017 — Google makes driverless cars commercially available, as Sergy Brin has predicted. This will just be in a few of the states that have shown openness to fostering the technology, like California, Nevada, Florida, and Michigan.